Smithology

After about four months I’ve finally finished crawling my way through The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. Not that it was a bad book or particularly long – I suppose 690 pages is longer than average but more that I have been so dog tired at night with the kids staying up due to daylight savings and all the business that goes with moving interstate that I’ve only been reading an average of a couple of hours a week which is just not enough.

I’ve read a few of Iain Banks’ novels now and I remain ambivalent about his story telling. By all rights I should be really enthused: his stories have some really cool settings and memorable characters, there is humour and sometimes deeper reflection on the human condition. Yet, I never seem to click with his stories, there is a certain bleakness and coldness that always pushes me away. Maybe it’s the way he almost predictably kills off the most loveable characters just when you’re really digging them, or the way his bad guys seem to always be able to go the extra evil mile. Possibly it’s a matter of what I’m needing when I read – I’m looking for escape and mental stimulation but usually not looking to be confronted with the impartiality and inevitability of death.

But now that I’ve got that out of the way, there are some really fun aspects of The Algebraist that I’ll take away. The setting being mostly in the atmosphere of a gas giant (think Jupiter) is a challenge because the mental picture is just brownish yellowish gas, but Banks brings it to life with the floating cities, the specialised gas craft that populate it and the stars of the show: the Dwellers.

The Dwellers are big kind of floaty aliens that live in the gas giants. At first they are depicted as ancient and super advanced, living in slow time and only communicating with other species through seers whom they sponsor and train. As the book unfolds we get to know some of these Dwellers more closely and come know that there is a lot more to them than meets the eye – and that they are unexpectedly fun!

The journey into the world of the Dwellers is conducted through the main protagonist Fassin Taak. Fassin is charged with the task of finding a certain artefact amongst the Dwellers that will, if it even exists, be of immense value. At the same time a massive army led by the spectacularly evil Archimandrite Luseferous (warrior priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9 IV and effective ruler of one hundred and seventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numerous significant artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, Executive High Admiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet(Det.) and once Triumvirate Rotational human/non-human Representative for the Cluster Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly) is approaching the Ulubis solar system (where the story takes place) bent on finding the same thing. This plot gives the story a kind of brooding race-against-time feeling as the dread lord comes closer and you can’t begin to imagine the nasty things he’s going to do when he arrives judging by the sport he engages in on the way.

During Fassin’s story we get a tour of the Ulubis system and some nice world building diversions as Banks lays out some pretty neat galactic history and galactic politics. There’s also a side story that made absolutely no sense to me and was possibly a whole other story that ended up being rolled into this novel for some reason (I’m talking about Saluus and Taince for those who’ve read the book already).

The final confrontation and wrap up of the book was pretty satisfying for me and not too over the top as these epic kinds of books often are.

I think I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if I’d read it in more concentrated doses so I could keep more of it in my head as I went. Now I am skimming bits of it I realise I forgot a lot of the stuff in the earlier chapters that are referred to towards the end.

Apart from my criticisms at the start of this post, on an overall view of things, this is a great read and worth looking at if you’re interested in getting a feel for Iain Banks before delving into his darker culture novels.

books, iain banks, scifi

I suppose I owe my twitter and facebook friends an explanation for my random, generalised anti-Christian exclamations of late. I won’t go into it all too much as I’ve got to take responsibility for some things. I understand that churches usually have a large body of people who are comfortable and busy and just aren’t able to give the bare minimum of the time of day to newcomers – some of them are even so snowed under that all they can manage is a grunt when you’re introduced to them or try to strike up a conversation. I get that. I understand that people come to church with many different needs and can be pretty high maintenance to talk to: mental illness, intellectual disability, child protection issues – it makes sense that you should kind of ghettoise these people all together up the back with the new people who have arrived with young kids. That way you can ignore everyone at once. What really hurts is when people try to solve you like you’re a problem, when people try to “minister” to you, when people discuss you in a committee to try and decide what should be done about you. What really hurts is when people talk down to you and give you helpful advice on how to raise your kids and how to make friends. What really hurts is when those people then try to sign you up to the music and sunday school roster.

And they wonder why the pews seem to get a little emptier every year.

life, religion, sale

You know how I sometimes go on in this blog about how I want Sol to mix with a diversity of people and not be locked into the mindset of valuing wealth above all things and being a snob? Well recently we’ve had a few social engagement that have really challenged that whole notion. It’s not just yesterdays morning tea during which our guests disclosed to us that they’ve had court orders against them from the state child protection system, who claim that the whole thing was a bungle and they’re totally innocent even while their children display some telltale signs of exposure to violent parenting, it’s not just that.

It’s not the way Sol made a friend at the park who I pushed on the swing and we later found out he was on a contact visit with his Mum after being removed by DHS because his parents are druggies.

Maybe the clincher is the kid who adopted Sol today and came over to play with him. As we ate lunch, he told us all about the day his Dad was made to go away because he was an al-caw-holic and he got really mad at mum and his sisters so she got a stick and poked him in the balls. Holy crap, we couldn’t change the subject fast enough!

Our impression of country Victoria after just a couple of weeks is that it’s the place where all the druggies, pedophiles and wife beaters come to get away from it all.

Maybe we’ll make some nice friends at school tomorrow – but at this rate I think I’ll be doing mandatory police checks before any after school play dates are entered into.

fatherhood, sale

Just as we are gearing up for Sol’s first day of school and talking to friends who’ve sent their kids to prep this week, the government has launched myschool.com.au, a website for benchmarking schools. The idea of the site is to just provide information for parents that will help them make decisions about what school they send their kids to (those that have a choice) but there are many concerns about the way this information can be abused or mislead parents who just look at the numbers without an understanding of the nature of statistics.

I’ve been reading The Memes of Production – Transparency and Equity at MySchool and specifically section 5 of the linked paper critiquing the government’s approach to education.

In short, the argument against this system is that it makes us compare schools based on a narrow set of assessments that can be manipulated ie. schools can just target themselves at these assessments to the detriment of other important qualities like having a positive school community – it encourages short sighted thinking. It doesn’t measure the actual quality of the teaching, only the results of the students which vary wildly with the demographic involved. It will be used as a stick to beat schools with ie. bad schools will have their head staff sacked while good schools will get more resources – this amounts to poor areas getting shafted and rich areas getting the good stuff.

I checked out Richlands East in Inala, it has mostly red bars, an ICSEA of 804 (where the range is 900-1100) and 20% indigenous. Obviously the headmaster here should be shot because he/she is crap. Their website says the school values creating a safe learning environment – in other words, the kids here are struggling with family violence, entrenched poverty and racial tensions in the community. What is the federal government going to do about that? In this case I don’t think myschool is going to make a difference, everyone knows who goes to this school. The school for it’s part, promotes a positive learning experience, embracing diversity and enhancing cultural identity, the success of which is not measured by ACARA but is arguably of long term educational benefit for this community.

UPDATE:
I also talked to Steph this morning about our local school and we discussed how it is an apparent success having gone from a bad reputation and having bad results just a few years ago compared to today where it has a good reputation and scores well on My School. Yet we’ve also heard that one way the school principle achieved this was through being tough on parents of under-performing children and possibly and allegedly driving them off to other schools. It is interesting that other previously good state schools in the area have had a decline in the same period. Could it be that our school has improved its benchmarks simply by expelling the students that were bringing it down? That’s good for the remaining students and the school but there is a huge moral issue right there.

I think My School is a fascinating website and it will be really interesting to see how this information affects things if at all but I can’t see how it could have a positive impact: it will just make elite schools more elite, make poor communities more ashamed and increase gaming of the figures. I support making this information available but I’d like to see a more positive approach than just naming and shaming.

As for my family, I’m trying to be even handed about all these issues: Sol starts school next week at a public school which offers a program tailored for students at the younger end of the age cutoff that would be socially behind their peers in a standard prep class. After this year, we’ll decide whether to leave him at that school or move him. In choosing a school, I’m looking at the resources of the school, the culture of the school, the peer group in terms of whether his friends will be a positive influence (when I say I’m thinking about his peer group, I’m considering that I want him to understand diversity and value individual virtues over social status and wealth as social determinants ie. I don’t want him to be a snob) and probably now will look at the My School results. However, I strongly believe his experience of school has to be fun and I’ll be doing my best to encourage him to have fun. I see my participation in his education as just as important as the school he goes to.

But I’ll still probably agonise about all this for the rest of my life anyway…

education, fatherhood

It’s Australia Day eve and the kids are asleep, Steph is watching The Mentalist just because it’s on and I’ve just uploaded the second episode of The Adventures of Flossy and Sol in which we discuss the town of Sale, Victoria.

View at Youtube.com

Notes:

Music is by You Am I: The Applecross Wing Commander from the Hi Fi Way album.

This episode marks my first use of iMovie 9’s greenscreen effect for the title stop motion sequence in which we make some little paper roulettes fly by. I used a small green sheet and some green cardboard which was a slightly different shade and you can see it pretty easily. I also had trouble wrestling a freeze frame of the green screened clip so ended up importing a still which iMovie rendered as a different colour blue. In short, while you can do greenscreen in iMovie 9, you have very little control and it turns out greenscreen needs very careful lighting to avoid shadows and also I probably should have used paint and used the exact same colour on everything.

Last year we bought a harddisk video camera and looking at footage from it here, it looks very blurry and over compressed. I’m not sure if it’s a fault with the camera, the Mac or if it’s just that the camera has always been poor quality – I think it is the latter. It is a pretty low end camera but I was expecting better – my iPhone gives better quality video!

fatherhood, sale, the adventures of flossy and sol

I was just reading the latest ABC news coverage of what seems to be a growing awareness of a child protection crisis in this country.

From my small knowledge of child protection issues, I can see that child abuse cases are an indicator of the health of our society in general being linked with family violence, drug and alcohol abuse and just poverty. So what all these reports are really telling us is that Australia’s underclass is growing in numbers and probably snowballing as todays victims grow up to become perpetrators of abuse on the next generation.

I believe this is the legacy of Australia’s economic boom times over the last ten to fifteen years. Many of us have ridden the wave of housing markets and stock markets while many others of us have been left behind. For those who are excluded from the market, there is low self-esteem and hopelessness.

We as Australians need to find a sense of value that isn’t exclusively linked to our net worth. We need to have a sense of dignity and virtue that doesn’t stem from what the bank thinks of us. In an ideal world, I’m talking about a greater sense of community and less individualism but I don’t know how we can make that happen. Please post your solutions to Australia’s problems in the comments.

politics

I don’t get to listen to podcasts as much as I used to. When I worked full time and drove forty minutes to work, I used to actually plug my macbook into an iPod dock in the car and listen to them. (My colleagues used to joke that the Macbook was a giant iPod)

I’ve got a bit of a new routine now where I can listen to podcasts while I do a bit of housework and also while I put Flossy to sleep. In the latter case, we retreat to her bedroom where we have a comfy chair and I put the headphones in while she has her milk and then drifts off with her head on my chest.

I recently went back to Cory Doctorow’s podcast where he has been reading a short story called Martian Chronicles. It is worth a listen if you also find some time in your day for podcasts and enjoy science fiction. It’s about a teenager going to Mars to be a colonist but also acts as a launching pad (good pun eh?) for a discussion of the nature of success and failure with a focus on economics and society.

I like the way Cory is able to weave his political ideals and thinking into his stories and still keep them entertaining without the feeling that you’re being lectured to too much. It’s something I also admire in Ken Macleod.

At this stage I haven’t finished listening to the story but there has been an interesting twist which is going to force our main character to decide which side of the fence he sits on and how he’s going to live with that.

If anyone else has a listen, I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on it. To listen, you have to get it from his podcast

cory doctorow, scifi

Despite being a pretty agnostic kind of guy, I’ve been brought up going to church and have continued to do so (mostly) over the years. Since coming to Sale, we’ve been hopping along to the local Anglican franchise, partly just to meet some people and partly for some kind of spiritual experience.

Churches in the west are suffering pretty badly in this day and age. It’s the baby boomers: they went to Sunday school and weren’t having a bar of it. Their parents shoved religion down their necks and they spat it out the first chance they got. My generation grew up viewing Christians as a bunch of naive kill-joys who mean well but are ultimately safely ignored. More recently we’ve come to see Christians as part of the larger destructive force in the world called “religion”: the root of all trouble and strife whether it be suicide bombers or homophobic anti abortion lobbyists.

Anglicans tend to fall into the “quirky but harmless” end of the religious spectrum: Congregations of ageing pew warmers or in the more progressive parishes, younger slightly hippie neo-pantheists or fervent evangelicals armed with acoustic guitars and chorus books. Scattered about are the social misfits: a few with mental illnesses, a few with intellectual disabilities and the working poor.

Today we changed the channel and headed up the road to the happy-clappies where you’ve got young hotties praising the Lord with soft-rock and ecstatic hand-waving followed by a guy holding a Bible who talks about how different Christians are because they have God. Everybody then gets in their four wheel drives and heads to their manicured middle class homes where they eat gourmet salad and watch reruns of 7th Heaven ... or something.

So where do we fit in? That’s what I’ve been asking myself for the last ten years. Sometimes we seem to get it right and make great friends who we connect with and who become a kind of extended family but it never seems to last. Other times, well, maybe church is not meant for critical thinkers. If only I had a heart.

religion

It was a bit bloody hot today wasn’t it? Assuming you live in Victoria, if not, just take my word for it: it was hot and humid and mighty unpleasant but then we got a nice tropical storm which whipped up a cool breeze and brightened up the mood.

In other news, our kids had their first day with their family day carer here today. As I might have previously mentioned, I reluctantly went and got myself employed part time which means the kids need someone to look after them. At first we put them in a local day care centre but they hated it so Steph asked around and found us a decent family day carer (being in child protection is sometimes handy because you know people who you can trust with your kids as well as the downside of knowing about all of the people who are a danger to your kids).

I used to think that once Sol was talking, he would be able to tell us all his problems and things like this would go so much smoother. I’m coming to realise that this is not the case. It turns out kids can’t always articulate or have the reflective capacity to give you an evaluation of their situation.

So in this case, Sol was saying that he didn’t like day care. “It goes for too long”, “I go to the door a lot to see if you’ve come to pick me up”.

But how do you know that this isn’t just his reaction to being in day care in general. Surely he would say this no matter what day care arrangement he had because what he wants is to be home with his parents. So while I felt sad that he didn’t like day care, I tended to just ignore the problem. He wasn’t able to specifically tell me why he didn’t like it or to really explain what the problem was.

However, Steph was a bit more critical and I suppose things came to a head when she was having to go into the centre to pick up other peoples kids in her child protection work. Hence the move to family day care today.

Well, what a difference it was today with both the drop-off and the pick-up. We walked into a house where it was relatively quiet and our day carer gave us her full attention while we were there. I chatted with one of the other kids there and helped Sol get to know him and by the time I left, one of the other kids had taken Sol and Flossy under his wing and they were actually happy for Steph and me to leave. Flossy cried for about ten seconds when we handed her over which was a big contrast to still being able to hear her as we left the building at the centre.

When I picked them up, Sol was pretty relaxed and watching a bit of TV while Felicity was chilling with a milk arrowroot and smiling happily. Contrast this with when I usually walk in to the centre and Sol is just standing at the door waiting for me while Felicity is rocking back and forth staring with red rimmed eyes.

On the way home from day care, Sol informed me that he liked that day care and that it wasn’t too long and neither did he wait at the door. He also volunteered that he liked how he and Felicity weren’t separated.

So there you have it, oils aint oils and day cares aint day cares. Unfortunately I can’t say that family day care is always superior to centre based. With family day care, you can have issues if your carer is sick or has a holiday and it is even harder to get one that has the days you need. You also have to be in the know a bit to get the top-notch carers. There are some pretty slack carers about and others who just don’t get it. The whole reason we didn’t get a family day carer as our first option was because we felt it was rare to find a good one but our lesson learned today was that at least with our kids, it’s worth making the effort to track down some good day care so you can have a little peace of mind while you’re off being a wage slave.

fatherhood

In case you haven’t had enough of Christmas, our family has edited up a video for your viewing pleasure documenting our first Christmas away from home / at our new home. As I explain in the video, this is episode 1 of The Adventures of Flossy and Sol but carries on from Matt and Sol’s Favourite Things only Felicity now gets a mention in the title and has some lines (she says ‘that’ during the commentary if you listen carefully)

Watch it on youtube to get the full size.

Music is by Bing Crosby who remains the best Christmas Carols singer of all time.

christmas, fatherhood, the adventures of flossy and sol